June 5, 2006

• A Reminder…

  Eight years ago today I lost my daddy to a forty year battle with alcohol.  I remember my father as being a very kind and loving man who adored his little girl more than anything in the world…well, besides his horses who came in a very close second that is.  However, the side of my father that I lived with the majority of the time was the one that was completely influenced by the demon that he carried.  It was the opposite from that of which I held so dearly.

  
  

  

  
  

  The day that my dad died he went to lunch with my mother and expressed how proud he was of me and how I had become such an amazing mother.  He also told her how sorry he was that he was so absent from my life for so long due to living life through an alcohol bottle.  Dad had come full circle in his life by that point in more ways than one and his body was experiencing the full affects that drinking most of his life had bestowed.  His organs were shutting down slowly causing severe bloating and the retaining of water, and he had contracted Hepatitis C earlier that year, not to mention the fact that he already had heart disease and an artificial valve that was in desperate need of replacement.  However, my dad was entirely too stubborn to undergo a procedure to prolong his life despite the pleas of myself or his cardiologist.  Alcohol had robbed him of many things including a marriage of over twenty years.  My mother loved him dearly and my father worshipped the ground that she’d walked on, but she couldn’t bare to watch him kill himself every single day…it tore them apart.

  
  

  I too had given up on “saving” my father long ago.  It was after he attempted suicide in the summer of 1988 that I finally told him that I couldn’t watch him do this anymore.  He blamed me for driving him to do this because I was gone that summer helping a friend of my mother’s take care of her newborn.  So my absence then became his scapegoat for a stupid and selfish decision.  This was his way of dealing with the reality of my mother filing for divorce and the fact that I had knowledge of this decision before he had been served the papers.  He disowned me for two years following this event.

  
  

  We had our ups and downs in the years beyond, but we’d finally made amends by the time he died.  In fact, he was planning to come visit me here in Colorado for my birthday just a little over a month away from the day he died.  The one thing that he did leave me that meant more than anything was a letter that I found the day after he died while going through his things in his room.  He didn’t tell me of this letter before he passed, but I knew it was there when I walked into the room.  He spoke of many things in the letter but most of all of how he was excited and looking forward to our visit and that he wanted me know how much he loved me and missed me.  Those words have helped me through the past eight years.

  
  

  No…my journey with my father was not an easy one, but I loved him none the less.  He was and always will be my daddy.

  
  

  Mario F. Savastano

  
  

  Aug. 29, 1927 – June 5, 1998

  
  

  

  • 10:27 am
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